Geographic Information Visualization and Analysis (GIVA)
The GIVA group is responsible for teaching and research in geographic information science at the GIScience Center of the Department of Geography, together with the GIS and Geocomputation groups.
GIVA Mission
Discover and teach new insights on how to creatively design geographic information displays that encourage healthy engagements with the world.
Our Vision
Smart geographic information displays that offer equitable access to knowledge, are engaging to use, and empower all citizens to live a healthy and environmentally sustainable life, in a diverse, democratic, and mobile digital information society.
More on our research interests...
News
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New Publication
Prof. Dr. Sara Fabrikant and her co-authors have published an article on "Digital health and the COVID-19 epidemic: an assessment framework for apps from an epidemiological and legal perspective" in Swiss Medical Weekly. Congratulations, Sara!
Link to the published paper: https://smw.ch/article/doi/smw.2020.20282
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Open PhD position - Visual analytics of mobile behaviour data in digital cities
Are you interested in carrying out a PhD? We are happy to invite applications for a doctoral research position at the research group "Geovisual analytics and digital transformation" led by Dr. Tumasch Reichenbacher. The PhD project is embedded in the larger context of the UZH Digital Society Initiative and aims at understanding mobility patterns and geographic information usage behaviour in varying mobile decision-making contexts from a digital transformation perspective. For more information regarding the position and how to apply please see the official advertisement.
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Congratulations to Sascha Credé!
With great pleasure, we announce that Sascha Credé has successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis “The Benefits of Global Landmarks for Spatial Learning under Stress” on November 13th, 2019. GIVA would like to thank him for writing and maintaining the GIVA website for years, and for setting up the experiment participant portal, aside from doing his Ph.D. Congratulations from the GIVA group and every success in your future career!
The picture shows Sascha during the Ph.D. graduation ceremony (from left to right: Dean of Faculty of Science Roland Sigel, Sascha Credé, Sara Irina Fabrikant).
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New publications
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GIVA welcomes new staff
GIVA is glad to welcome Dr. Ian Ruginski as new member of the team! Ian is a senior scientist who studies visual perception, navigation, and spatial cognition from an interdisciplinary perspective. He joined us from the University of Utah, where Ian received his PhD in Psychology focusing in Cognition and Neural Science (CNS) and worked as a postdoctoral fellow on the Spatial Cognition and Navigation project. In his empirical work, Ian has investigated different methods of uncertainty visualizations, emotion and spatial learning, and individual differences in spatial cognition. In his recent research, Ian is particularly interested in individual differences in spatial abilities, including how these are affected by geographic information display use.
Ian, we’re thrilled to have you on board !
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COSIT 2019 in Regensburg
This year, COSIT was held September 9-13 and hosted by the Chair for Information Science in the cosy Bavarian town of Regensburg, Germany. We would like to express our gratitude to the conference organization, to all keynote speakers, presenters, and attendees of COSIT 2019! On the behalf of Tyler Thrash and the international team of researchers, Kai-Florian Richter presented an exciting Vision paper with the title "The future of geographic information displays from GIScience, cartographic, and cognitive science perspectives". In the Doctoral Colloquium, Bingjie Cheng and Armand Kapaj successfully presented their PhD research projects.
Tyler Thrash, Sara Lanini-Maggi, Sara I. Fabrikant, Annina Bruegger, Sascha Crede, Kai-Florian Richter, Cao Tri Do, Haosheng Huang, Stefan Muenzer, Georg Gartner and Sven Bertel. The future of geographic information displays from GIScience, cartographic, and cognitive science perspectives (Vision Paper)
Bingjie Cheng. Enhancing Spatial Learning with an Adaptive Navigation System That Employs Neurofeedback
Armand Kapaj. Landmark Visualization on Mobile Devices for Effective Pedestrian Navigation:Assessing the Effects of Realism for Spatial Learning
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GIVA @ ECTQG2019
Strong showing of GIVA at the European Colloquium on Theoretical and Quantitative Geography (ECTQG) in Mondorf-Les-Bains, Luxembourg on 5-9 September 2019.
Sara Fabrikant held her keynote "Smart mobile citizen sensing for wise decisions of
tomorrow’s digital society". In her talk, Sara highlighted ongoing empirical research on human and context responsive geographic information displays used in the GIVA labs and in the wild, capitalizing on ambulatory human behavior sensing methods (i.e., eye tracking, galvanic skin response, and EEG measurements, etc.). Her talk stimulated interessting discussions on designing smart, user, task, and context responsive geographic information interfaces for tomorrow’s digital society.The special session Mobilities and Health was co-organized by the GIUZ. In his presentation with the title "Identifying activity spaces from geo-referenced Twitter data: Superstorm Sandy, mobility patterns, and emotions in New York City" Ivor Mardesic showcased how georeferenced social media data can be used to identify activity spaces and emotions.
GIVA says thank you to the organizers and all staff members for the welcoming atmosphere and the professional organization.
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Winner of the Best Article of the Year
The Psychonomic Society honors individuals for the best paper published in each Psychonomic Society journal in the last year. The nomination of the paper is based on a vote of the associate editors. The winner of the Best Paper of the Year for the journal Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications in 2019 is awarded to Annina Brügger, Kai-Florian Richter and Sara I. Fabrikant for their paper " How does navigation system behavior influence human behavior?". The journal publishes new empirical and theoretical work covering all areas of Cognition, with a special emphasis on use-inspired basic research. GIVA congratulates Aninna, Kai-Florian, and Sara to this terrific success!
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International Cartographic Conference 2019
Strong showing of GIVA at the International Cartographic Conference held from July 15 - 20, 2019 in Tokyo, Japan.
In the Waldo Tobler memorial session, Sara Fabrikant, Aileen Buckley, Menno-Jan Kraak,Timothy Trainor, and Harold Moellering put the scientific work of Waldo Tobler in the spotlight. The session led to great discussions and new inspiring research questions for the community.
In the conference presentation track, Sara Fabrikant presented the results of Michelle Korporaal's Master thesis. In her work How are map-based decisions influenced by uncertainty visualization in risky and time-critical situations?, she could show that decision-making processes were different when slope uncertainty was depicted.
A way how cartographers might better understand how people make decisions with maps is to create new research tools for the community. Tumasch Reichenbacher presented A tool for generating testable pop-out effects in geovisual displays. We are looking forward to see the first prototype.
Tumasch Reichenbacher also presented at the Mobile Map UX workshop. In his lightning talk Re-visiting Fundamental Principles of Mobile Cartography, Tumasch Reichenbacher outlined the major research challenges regarding user experience design for mobile cartography.
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Keynote @ GISTAM 2019
Sara Fabrikant held her keynote at the 5th GISTAM conference in Heraklion, Crete – Greece on 3-5 May, 2019. In her talk "Smart Geographic Information Displays for Wise Decision Making" Sara highlighted how cognition and vision theories support the process of designing human, task, and context responsive geographic information interfaces for wise decisions of the future digital society.
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Dagstuhl Seminar on Visual Analytics for Sets over Time and Space
Together with Silvia Miksch (TU Wien, AT) and Alexander Wolff (Universität Würzburg, DE), Sara Fabrikant organized and attended the Dagstuhl-Seminar on Visual Analytics for Sets over Time and Space. The seminar was held 5 - 10 may 2019 and brought together researchers from different fields to work on enhancing space-time visualizations. The main goal of that workshop was to identify specific theoretical and practical problems that need to be solved in order to create dynamic and interactive set visualizations that take into account time and space. Results will be published soon in the monthly Dagstuhl Reports https://www.dagstuhl.de/en/publications/dagstuhl-reports/ .
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Updated MSc topics
Dear MSc students,
There are many ways to find a MSc research topic. A very helpful starting point is to have a look at our updated webpage of MSc topics. With our new arrivals Oliver and Tumasch at GIVA, we can also offer some exciting novel topics. Of course you can also always approach us with your own ideas. Feel free to contact one or more of the relevant supervisors already some time before the start of the thesis to discuss a possible startup/subject. Thanks and see you!
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New publications
New publications by GIVA members:
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GIVA welcomes new staff
GIVA is glad to welcome Armand, Oliver, and Tumasch, the three new members of the team! Tumasch Reichenbacher is a senior scientist and a specialist in analyzing and visualizing geographic information. Tumasch gives the lecture in cartography (GEO123) this spring. Oliver Grübner is a senior researcher in Epidemiology and Biostatistics. In his research, he uses spatial epidemiological approaches to chronic diseases including mental health and he tries to understand how social media can be leveraged in this context. At GIVA, Oliver teaches the Geovisualization (GEO878) and Statistics (GEO246) courses this spring. Armand Kapaj is the new PhD student in the context of the ERC Advanced Project GeoViSense.
We’re thrilled to have you on board !
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EMOtive research featured in a televised report
Humans inscreasingly navigate using smart mapping apps. While this geographic information technology is convenient, it is limited in supporting us in our cognitive abilities to orient ourselves in space, and to acquire knowledge about our surroundings. In the SNF supported Emotive project, Sara Irina Fabrikant, Kai-Florian Richter, Annina Brügger and Sascha Credé investigate how smart navigation assistants of the future should be designed to not only take navigators and wayfinders safely to their desired destinations, but also to support them in learning to orient and wayfind themselves. This Emotive research has been featured in a televised report, developed by the SRF Nano team. You can see the broadcasted video here. We wish take the opportunity to thank the SRF Nano team for this expressive results of a pleasant and professional collaboration.
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Zürich meets San Francisco
Sara Irina Fabrikant, Tyler Thrash and Annina Brügger organized a workshop on Wayfinding and Navigation as part of the Urban Tech Summit at the event "Zürich meets San Francisco" in corporation with swissnex SF on Oct, 23, 2018 in San Francisco (US). In Santa Barbara, they hosted a workshop on geographic information displays (GIDs) at the Center for Spatial Studies at UCSB and visited the companies Biopac and WorldViz to get informed on the latest developments on physiology experiments and virtual reality.
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GeoViSense Workshop
As part of the new ERC Advanced Grant "GeoViSense", Sara Fabrikant and team organized a two-day workshop in Zurich on the topic of personalized and context-responsive geographic information displays (GIDs). We invited participants from around Europe in order to discuss the future of GIDs and devise designs for GIDs during a series of small group exercises. The participants included experts from various disciplines, including computer science, cognitive science, geography, and neuroscience. GIVA says thank you for your most valuable input!
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Keynote @ AGILE2018
Sara Fabrikant held her keynote at the 21st AGILE conference in Lund, Sweden on 12-15 June, 2018. In her talk "Geotechnologies for All: Leaving All for Last" Sara highlighted ongoing empirical research on human and context responsive geographic information displays. Her talk stimulated interessting discussions on designing human, task, and context responsive geographic information interfaces for all.
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Day of Computer Science 2018
Relying on digital navigation assistance is often the most comfortable way of finding one's way through unfamiliar places. However, we typically don't pay a lot of attention to the path we are following and when assistance is not available anymore, we find ourselves disoriented. What are the reasons for this negative relation and how can we improve navigation displays so that they support orientation in the long term? At the Tag der Informatik, GIVA demonstrated their virtual reality laboratories to a public audience. Sascha Credé, Marie Müller and Arzu Cöltekin illustrated how empirical user studies in virtual cities can help to answer these questions. We like to say thank you for your interest and for the good discussions!
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Congratulations to Gianluca Boo!
With great pleasure we announce that Gianluca Boo has successfully defended his PhD thesis on “Dogs as Sentinels for Environmental Cancers Addressing the Challenges of Spatial Epidemiology”. Congratulations from the GIVA group. We wish Gianluca all the best for his future plans!
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GIVA @ Spatial Cognition Conference
Strong showing of GIVA members at the Spatial Cognition 2018 in Tübingen, Germany. All submissions (three posters and two workshops) were accepted and will be presented in Tübingen, Germany, September 5-8, 2018. We are looking forward to have interesting discussions.
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Research stay and seminar talk at Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden
During her research stay at the Computing Science Department at Umeå University, Annina Brügger extended her knowledge of Computing Science, human-computer interaction (HCI) and artificial intelligence (AI). Her talk titled "Automation in navigation systems - a focus on spatial learning" gave the audience an insight into automated systems and cognition from a spatial, geographical perspective. The talk and the research stay stimulated interesting and interdisciplinary discussions.
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Greater Zurich Area – a Center of Competence for Geographic Information Display
When seeking directions towards a new restaurant or the quickest connection to the office, people will retrieve their smartphones and navigate towards the destination almost effortlessly. However, does the ease with which we can now find our way come with a price? Will the use of such technologies lead to a decrement in the spatial abilities of the users? Read more in Tyler Trash's contribution for the "Greater Zurich Area Blog".
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Open PhD Positions – ERC Advanced Project GeoViSense
Are you interested in carrying out a PhD? We are happy to invite applications for a doctoral research position in the context of the ERC Advanced Project GeoViSense, led by the GIVA group head and PI Sara Irina Fabrikant. This project, at the interface of GIScience (geovisual analytics) and neuro-cognitive science aims to study how we make space-time decisions with geographic information displays (GIDs) in varying mobile decision making contexts.
For more details please see the official advertisement
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Presentation @ ICA Joint Workshop on Atlases, Cognition, and Usability 2018
Arzu Coltekin had a talk at the ICA Commissions Joint Workshop on Atlases, Cognition, and Usability, 2018 in Olomouc (Czechia). In the joint workshop, researchers discussed fundamental cognitive and usability issues related to carographic visualizations. In her talk, Arzu presented recent work on how age and spatial abilities influence route learning performance in virtual environments. For more details about the workshop, find the program here
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Presentation @ AAG 2018 Annual Meeting
How do we map what is not there? The understanding of efficient uncertainty visualization is a challange in cartographic design. Sara I. Fabrikant presented recent empirical findings on uncertainty visualizations at the American Association of Geographers' 2018 Annual Meeting. The symposium focused on research related to climate change visualization and mapping. For details about the symposium and the presented work, which is related to Irene Johannsen's Master thesis, please check out here
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Presentations @ ET4S Workshop
Annina Brügger, Ismini Lokka, Kenan Bektas and Arzu Cöltekin attended the 3rd International Workshop on Eye Tracking for Spatial Research (ET4S 2018) in Zurich (Switzerland) on January 14, 2018. They presented their work on eye tracking in oral talks and demo sessions. The ET4S workshop brought together researchers from different areas who have a common interest in using eye tracking for research questions related to spatial information.
Check out the Workshop Proceedings
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Sara Maggi @ Graduation Ceremony
Dekan Roland Sigel, GIVA's newest graduate Sara Maggi and Sara Irina Fabrikant at graduation ceremony. GIVA wishes Sara Maggi all the best and every success for the future.
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Congratulation for defending his PhD thesis!
We congratulate Kenan Bektas who defended his PhD thesis "Gaze Contingent Geovisualization for Level of Detail Management" successfully on december 1st, 2017. GIVA would like to thank him for his strong commitment and wish him every success in his future career. The picture shows Kenan Bektas & Sara Maggi together with their supervisors at the internal graduation ceremony on the university campus (from left to right: Sara Irina Fabrikant, Sara Maggi, Kenan Bektas, Arzu Coltekin.)
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Open PhD Position – ERC Advanced Project GeoViSense
Are you interested in carrying out a PhD? We are happy to invite applications for a doctoral research position in the context of the ERC Advanced Project GeoViSense, led by the GIVA group head and PI Sara Irina Fabrikant. This project, at the interface of GIScience (geovisual analytics) and neuro-cognitive science aims to study how we make space-time decisions with geographic information displays (GIDs) in varying mobile decision making contexts.
For more details please see the official advertisement
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Winners of the Michael Breheny Prize
The Michael Breheny Prize is awarded annually for the most innovative paper in Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science. The paper is chosen by the editors assisted occasionally by members of he editorial board of the journal. This year all four editors, Michael Batt, Richard Harris, Linda See and Sarah Williams with Dr. Seraphim Alvenides of Northumbria University made the choice, agreeing that the best paper published in 2016 be awarded to Marco. M. Salvini and Sara I. Fabrikant for their paper "Spatialization of user-generated content to uncover the multirelational world city network".
Congrats for this international recognition of former GIVA member Dr. Marco Salvini. Marco already received an UZH Science Distinction in 2012 for his PhD research.
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GIVA @ ET4S
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Giva @ COSIT 2017
Sascha Credé, Annina Brügger, Sara Irina Fabrikant and Kai-Florian Richter (former GIVA member) attended the 13th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT) in l'Aquila (Italy) from 4th to 8th of September 2017. Besides presenting at the doctoral colloquium (Annina Brügger) and at the workshop Rethinking Wayfinding Support Systems (Sascha Credé), they both won a Best Poster Award (first and third place). Congratulations!
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Join cutting edge research @ GIVA
GIVA invites motivated researchers for applications for two doctoral and two post-doctoral research positions in the context of the ERC Advanced Project GeoViSense, lead by the GIVA group head and PI Sara Irina Fabrikant.
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Master Thesis Questionnaire on the Visualization of Data Quality
Irene Johannsen, a geography student of Bonn University, Germany,
is writing her master thesis with GIVA. She is interested in the visualisation
of data quality in climate change maps. For that purpose she developed
an online questionnaire which addresses geographers and laypersons.
Feel free to participate (20 minutes). You’d make a Master’s student’s day! -
EuroVis 2017 Conference
Halldór Janetzko and colleagues presented their recent work on soccer movement generalization at the 19th EG/VGTC Conference on Visualization in Barcelona from 12th to 16th June. They won the Honorable Mention Award for their full paper on „Dynamic Visual Abstraction of Soccer Movement“.
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GIVA @ Urban Wayfinding and the Brain Conference 2017
Ismini E. Lokka and Annina Brügger presented their posters at the Urban Wayfinding and the Brain conference organized by the Royal Institute of Navigation, University College London and The Knowledge Transfer Network in London on June 14, 2017.
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Visiting students from FHNW
Along with the other units in GIScience Center, we hosted an excursion for 19 Geomatics students from the Institute of Geomatics Engineering FHNW on 16th of May 2017. After an overview of the research activities in respective groups, we demonstrated our CAVE where students explored the lab as a visualization research environment.
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Congratulations!
With great pleasure we announce that Sara Maggi has successfully defended her PhD thesis on “Depicting Movement Data with Animations for Embodied and Real-Time Decision-Making: A User Study with Air Traffic Control Displays and Real-Time Movement Data”. Congratulations from the GIVA group!
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VISDOM project update
GIVA received an SNF grant for an additional year for the VISDOM project, with Arzu Coltekin as the principle investigator (PI), Sara Fabrikant and Kai-Florian Richter as co-PIs, and Ismini-Eleni Lokka as the PhD candidate. You can find additional information on the project and a publication list on the following page: link
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Academic visit at the University of Maynooth, Ireland
Gianluca Boo was invited for an academic visit at the National Centre for Geocomputation (NCG) University of Maynooth, Ireland. Together with Prof. Chris Brunsdon, the director of the centre, Gianluca worked on a manuscript titled “A robust investigation of spatial-non stationarity and scale effects in models of canine cancer incidence”.
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GIVA @ International Cartographic Conference 2017
Strong showing of GIVA members at the 28th International Cartographic Conference 2017: All 6 submissions (extended abstracts) were accepted for oral presentation at the main conference in Washington, July 2-7, 2017.
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ThinkSpatial brownbag talk at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB)
André Bruggmann was invited to give a ThinkSpatial brownbag talk at the Center for Spatial Studies of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). In his talk titled „How Does GIScience Support Spatio-Temporal and Thematic Information Exploration in the Humanities“ he presented latest findings of his PhD project on how spatio-temporal and thematic information and interconnections implicitly stored in large online text archives in the humanities can be made explicit, and how this might help information seekers in the humanities learn and gain new insight into space, time, and theme. Find a detailed description of his talk here.
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GIScience Conference 2016
Sara Irina Fabrikant, Gianluca Boo and Annina Brügger each presented their current work at the GIScience 2016 conference in Montreal, Canada, from September 27 to 30. Gianluca Boo won the award for the best poster presentation and Annina Brügger won the award for the best short paper.
